Reassigned personnel have reportedly been relocated to divisions specializing in yield administration, mass manufacturing and course of design (through Jukanlosreve on X). That is apparently being interpreted as Samsung making an attempt to enhance its 3 nm fabrication yields earlier than transferring on to smaller chipsets. If that is true then Samsung’s plans for 1.4 nm chips by 2027 are nicely and actually useless for now.
And I consider that’s an excellent factor. Samsung Foundry has been struggling, laborious. Yield charges have been as little as a depressing 10 p.c and half of the foundry traces are being shut down. Even Samsung workers say that the corporate is in disaster because it plans to put off 30 p.c of its workforce earlier than the 12 months ends.
So if Samsung is keen to place its lofty ambitions on maintain for a second to concentrate on enhancing present manufacturing then that’s a win in my ebook. The corporate must get higher at manufacturing Exynos chips as a result of the choice simply received an entire lot worse.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Extremely makes use of a Snapdragon processor. | Picture credit score — PhoneArena
Fashionable chip measurements are advertising and marketing and never primarily based in reality. The soar from a “3 nm” chipset to a “2 nm” one can be a marginal enchancment at greatest. Bettering 3 nm yields, for my part, will serve Samsung much better financially than chasing after the subsequent nanometer breakthrough.